Texte zur Kunst

Ed Ruscha, "The Back of Hollywood", 1977

Anyone even vaguely knowledgeable about the development of American art over the last decades of the 20th century, will instantly think of a unique set of contributions when hearing about an exhibition called "Los Angeles: 1955-1985". And they will know that those contributions were made possible by a group of institutions located in the city. These were art schools such as CalArts (founded by Walt Disney in 1961), Chouinard and the University of California, San Diego. Out of CalArts came Conceptual Art; while the car culture supported by the maze of freeways that crosses the city brought an emphasis on artificial materials and high grades of finish into the domain of artistic expression. The relentless sunshine of the California coast made light into an aesthetic tool, as apparent in the work of James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, Larry Bell and Robert Irwin.

Entering the Los Angeles exhibition one is confronted with an array of Funk: Edward Kienholtz, Bruce Conner and George Herms. This is astonishing given the features of L.A. culture and sensibility mentioned above. Los Angeles, washed by the salt breezes of the Pacific Ocean and bleached by the constant sun, is the cleanest city in the United States. The high finish on the minimalist shapes of John McCracken and Ron Davis proclaims an expressive drive the very opposite of junk assemblage. No French visitor can perceive the development of the L.A. sensibility without seeing the art schools - their teachers and their students - presented coherently. Teaching at CalArts were Doug Huebler, Allan Sekula, Allan Kaprow and, most importantly John Baldessari. The conceptualist thrust was not only a function of the importance of photography as the expressive tool of their work but the way such photography was put in service to a single algorithm. Since an algorithm is the sign for an operation that will be continually repeated (such as +1 for counting), we see the algorithm going to work when Baldessari presents "The Back of All the Trucks ..." or Huebler sets himself the task of "photographing every person alive". CalArts students such as Jim Welling and Jack Goldstein demonstrate the effectiveness of this teaching while others, such as David Salle, Jim Kaisebeer, Matt Mullican and Troy Brauntuch prove the fecundity of Baldessari.

Feminism was nurtured by the open sensibility of the school, and such artists as Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro emerged from this. The Conceptualism at CalArts spilled over to other L.A. institutions, with Ed Ruscha at Chouinard producing the books that are its hallmark.

Not only are these institutions not presented coherently, but extremely poor choices, poor installations and strange omissions make it difficult for an untutored viewer to make sense of the profusion. The first is represented by the peculiar selection of Robert Irwin's work. That artist, so careful about his own presentations would surely have vetoed the painting exhibited had it not come from his dealer, Pace/Wildenstein. Near it is a very good white-on-white relief lent from the collection of Eli Broad. Irwin's installations, so sensitive to the sculpture of captured light, are absent, as is anything by Michael Asher, surely the most important site-specific artist to have emerged from the West Coast. The installation of the Larry Bell boxes is so poorly lit that their impact is made invisible.

What is also invisible is the rivalry between Los Angeles and New York resulting not only in a group of very ambitious galleries such as Ferus, Ace and Dwan, but also of the rival art magazine Artforum, determined to wrest the grip of the historical account of the avant-garde from the East Coast critical establishment. The brilliant editorship of Philip Leider propelled Artforum to the front of critical discourse and reinforced the prescience of the L.A. dealers such as Irving Blum for their choices, which included the exhibition of Warhol's "Campbell Soup Cans" at Ferus in 1962, or of Yves Klein's blue monochromes at Dwan in 1961. The wealth of Los Angeles could also support ambitious museums of advanced art, whose talented curators supported the art scene as well. These were Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum and Maurice Tuchman at the L.A. County Museum of Contemporary Art (the site of the important "Art and Technology" exhibition).

New York could boast of none of this. Its art magazines, such as Art News, dealt in belle-lettristic gush, rather than close analysis. Its schools were still in thrall to the effects of Abstract Expressionism. Its only advantages came in the form of the artists' housing and studios available in the spacious downtown lofts of SoHo, and the galleries these spawned. The other was the presence of Clement Greenberg, whose precise, spare prose focused the formal features of the works he discussed and produced the historical groupings that gave those features meaning.

Testimony from students at CalArts shows that the intelligence of its teachers was to dampen this antagonism. Jim Welling writes: "John [Baldessari]'s teaching consisted of returning from Europe with a suitcase full of catalogues (...) We saw the Documenta 5 and When Attitudes Become Form catalogues as well as issues of Benjamin Buchloh's magazine Interfunktion. A lot of artists went up to CalArts to do talks, probably because of friendships with John - the Bechers, Daniel Buren, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Joan Jonas, Yvonne Rainer, Richard Serra". Baldessari's cosmopolitanism thus meant that the CalArts student, conversant in the issues represented by both coasts (Richard Serra plus Bob Irwin), had a far wider range of choices for the conceptualist work that would eventually be produced.

That the New York/Los Angeles rivalry plays no role in the presentation at the Centre Pompidou is as conspicuous an oversight as the failure to organize the show around the armatures of the art schools. This leaves the French viewer utterly uninstructed in the crucial contribution of Los Angeles to the modernist avant-garde.

"Los Angeles 1955-1985", Centre Pompidou, Paris, 8 March-17 July 2006